Agreed (and I realised that you meant me!)

Apropos of keeping people politically ignorant, I see something of a parallel in our dismal failure for many decades in providing good education for sex and relationships. For years, schools were allowed to get away with avoiding it completely, and all too often it was all about diagrams and the school nurse rolling a condom on to a boiling tube. There are still people who campaign against it, threatening to take their offspring out of the lessons. So what's the damage? Children getting their "information" from the unpoliced internet, that's what, ending up with a very warped notion of what sex is about, girls pressured into giving in to entitled boys with all the bullying and loss of self-esteem that it entails. Pornhub cheerfully filling the vacuum that the education system has pusillanimously created, exploiting the vulnerable for all its worth. The same thing happens when the electorate is kept ignorant. We are made far more vulnerable to the lies and populism with their meretricious and easy attractiveness, helped, of course, by the right-wing press. Seventy or eighty million people voted for Trump, in most cases unknowingly dead against their own interests. We Brits ended up with a lying, cheating charlatan who was raising champagne glasses with his fellow scumbags while the rest of us were kept in our houses away from loved ones.

Good education, whether in politics, relationships or the environment, increases our resilience in the face of attempts to exploit us. Nothing is perfect, and there may be risks, but if we lay the groundwork then leave our teachers to it we will create a generation which will question everything, be far less susceptible to exploitation and which will make far better political choices.